Sheesh almost do not want to put my experience. Basically have been coding as long as I have been on here. All these people here that are younger with more years in coding boggles my mind...well not really but I feel ashamed for not starting sooner.

I like this idea but it may deter me or others from answering or trying to answer some questions as we my no longer be taken seriously with the piddling amount of time we have been coding for.

We're a relatively friendly bunch. I think this experiment will work out fine - even if we escort one or two beloved ones to the padded room, to reflect upon their snarky remarks.

Remember that sharing something 'personal' (eventhough this barely qualifies as such) most of the time results in a better relation. I think it'll all be fine, but maybe I'm naive. That's why you don't even need to opt out: you're not 'in' by default. Nobody is going to hold it against you if you prefer holding your cards to your chest

Hi, appreciate more people! Σ ♥ = ¾Learn how to award medals... and work your way up the social rankings!

You can scroll up on it to get the history, but the basics of it is that people were using medals as punishment and overcrowding the chit-chat monster with posts. In other words, it acts like the "calm before the storm", giving a little bit of a warning before you end up getting banned for bad forum behavior.

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TBH... I was looking at the Exp, and it looks quite boring being a number. Can we change it to something a little bit more visible and entertaining like stars or something. Like...

1 star => less than 1 year

2 stars => 1 - 3 years

3 stars => 4 - 7 years

4 stars => 8 - 15 years

5 stars => 16+ years

If they want the number details, then they can just look into the profile. But I feel that it'll make it more interesting if we had a visual icon representation of the experience. It'll also help make experience look more vague, which is good. Hopefully it'll also inspire newbies to stick with the language.

TBH... I was looking at the Exp, and it looks quite boring being a number. Can we change it to something a little bit more visible and entertaining like stars or something. Like...

If they want the number details, then they can just look into the profile. But I feel that it'll make it more interesting if we had a visual icon representation of the experience. It'll also help make experience look more vague, which is good. Hopefully it'll also inspire newbies to stick with the language.

The more 'vague' the representation, the more inclined you are to play the system. If we were to have this star-based system, people would be likely to change the number just enough to get that one extra star. If you, however blatantly ask for their experience, it's a lot harder to lie about it - like when somebody asks you to look into their eyes, and tell them what you just said was really the truth. Somehow it's much harder to lie when you can't beat about the bush.

Hi, appreciate more people! Σ ♥ = ¾Learn how to award medals... and work your way up the social rankings!

@ Riven: It looks like you are thinking about it, what is good, but maybe a little (or not that little) bit too much...People who have nothing better to do will lie about this.But there is no real advantage by doing it. It does not matter whether someone says the truth or not because it does not really affect anything important...

The Java experience information is interesting but only the result is important :- When you ask a question, how who cares the experience of the answerer, if the answer is fine and usefull- When you talk to somebody, more in a post, you always have to do it with respect, even with beginners.That's all for me !

There was a post in a thread some time ago where somebody put together different steps for java programmers most people go through some time ago (where was it?)...Maybe such a way would be a little bit better to measure java/programming experience, because we should not forget about years you leave out, are burnt out or such...

What do you expect? People ranking themselves on the 'hello world', 'thy holy design' to 'treat code as a tool, not like an art' scale? Given the discussion sparked by the latest feature, I can only imagine endless debate about the order of stages, and whether they belong on the scale in the first place.

As for allowing people to incorporate 'lost years', well, that's actually why I didn't implement this feature as 'when did you start'.

Sure, there are a dozen ways to do a better job, but I have this pesky thing called bills and a job to take care of them, mixed with time consuming mandatory social interaction with arbitrary loved ones. Well, that, and my impromptu motto: 'less is more, mkay'

Now get off my lawn, I'm mowing for the greater good!

Hi, appreciate more people! Σ ♥ = ¾Learn how to award medals... and work your way up the social rankings!

Well, honestly, even though I'm a fan of the feature, I am happy that people are still thinking about it.

The reason I thought about making more "vague" is exactly that, you told people that they should "lie" if they feel the representation wasn't fitting of the experience they had. It is amazing how changing something from a number to a medal carries a lot more weight.

All-in-all, this feature doesn't really do anything.

I mean, it doesn't account for talent, the ability for developers to complete projects in a timely manner, or even the ability to figure out a business application writer from an indie game programmer. All we have here is just a metric on how experienced someone is.

There is something very much in the "uncanny valley" when it comes to this feature. Even though I think it is a good idea, there is an eerie feeling I have of this feature being misused. I just haven't thought about how that could be yet...

I mean, it doesn't account for talent, the ability for developers to complete projects in a timely manner, or even the ability to figure out a business application writer from an indie game programmer. All we have here is just a metric on how experienced someone is.

Well, obviously. We even fail to measure all of this in a job interview, and sometimes in a job. I do not aspire to make this statistic an accurate representation of skill... it's experience, measured in time, because that's quantifiable in a way that everybody can grasp. It's just another number to be integrated in all the impressions we get from peoples questions, answers and projects.

And then there is the issue of self evaluation. Ask somebody whether he/she is smart - the vast majority deems themselves smarter than average. Does that make sense? Absolutely not. The underlying problem is that we can't imagine how it is to be smarter than we are ourselves. The same applies to experience. Throughout your life you'll be likely to consider yourself experienced in what you do. Looking back on the last years, you'll recognize that you were actually inexperienced. A few years from now you'll say the same about today. We can deduce from that that experience actually is time related - it's just that everybody just has it's own base level and coefficient. My conclusion is that it's valuable to crudely express experience in time, especially for the first years of attaining said experience.

@Gef: This metric ought to be used to evaluate questions, not answers. As per the opening post.

Hi, appreciate more people! Σ ♥ = ¾Learn how to award medals... and work your way up the social rankings!

However, as far as Riven's use case goes, I'm not sure it will really work that way.

People relatively new to programming (and so also this forum) are not going to know about the feature, and so we won't be able to tell anyway. And then when they do find it, how many of them are going to want to admit they've only been programming for so short?

And if you're worrying about not having been a programmer very long, look at it the other way around. Think of it as "I've only been programming for _ and I am able to do _ etc."

In the end, it's about your skill, your participation in the community, and your friendliness that people are going to watch for, not how long you've been programming.

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